Godzilla is back on the big screen and stomping all over the box office with a message as relevant for 2014 as it was 60 years ago when the big guy first appeared.

Director Gareth Edwards' new Godzilla movie made $93.2 million this weekend, according to Rentrak, setting a record for monster-movie debuts. This version saw the gigantic creature taking on a pair of M.U.T.O.s (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism) in San Francisco while mankind tries to survive the showdown.

The box office response shows that folks still love Godzilla just as they did in 1954, when the original Japanese Gojira unleashed a walking, stomping metaphor for the atomic age.

"I can't think of another monster, other than dragons, who's made it into popular myth the way he has," says the new movie's creature designer, Andrew Baker. "In some aspects, he's man's savior, and in some aspects he's our doom. There's something pretty cool about that."

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A Godzilla fan looks at a 1-meter tall statue at a Godzilla art exhibition in Tokyo on May 2.(Photo: Yoshikazu Tsuno, AFP/Getty Images)

William Tsutsui, author of Godzilla on My Mind: Fifty Years of the King of Monsters, grew up watching Godzilla movies in the '50s and '60s in central Texas and says the character evokes a feeling of nostalgia for those of his generation. Plus, he's simply fun to watch.

"He defends Japan, and yet he's always somewhat surly toward Japan,'' says Tsutsui. "Even after he's vanquished a space alien, he still has enough energy to drag his feet through a Japanese city on the way back, which is hilarious.''

Godzilla has always fit the times and the fears of the moment, says Godzilla screenwriter Max Borenstein. Following his nuclear origins nine years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he became a cinematic folk hero acting as Japan's champion against alien invaders. Later movies found him fighting environmental degradation and bio-engineering hazards.

Godzilla represents "a force so far beyond our control that the most destructive technology we've ever mustered, a nuclear weapon, is food,'' says Borenstein. "It's nothing to him and he's immune to it."

As the antihero of the new movie, Godzilla represents nature, says star Aaron Taylor-Johnson. "We and the M.U.T.O.s represent how mankind polluted Earth with radiation and nuclear (energy). Godzilla's job is to restore balance."

Edwards found a way to tie that into current affairs, where Western countries try to control who can have nuclear power and who can't.

"What if there was a creature who was attracted to radiation?" the director says. "Suddenly, the tables would be turned and everyone who had this power would be desperately trying to get rid of it."

The greatest thing about Godzilla for Edwards is that he's not a disposable popcorn-movie concept but is instead something that taps into our very worst nightmares as a society.

"In the thousands if not millions of years we've evolved as part of nature, every day there was a sense that an animal would kill us or our family or attack our huts and caves," Edwards explains. "It's hardwired in our DNA to expect this, and now that our caves have become 30 stories high, our built-in fears also become 30 stories."

As crazy as that seems, says Edwards, "there's something about it where you feel like, yeah, I knew it was going to come. I always knew Godzilla was coming."